Amy Jensen Mowl
IFMR Finance Foundation

“Big Data for Financial and Social Inclusion: Opportunities and Challenges for Alternative Data and Credit Analytics in India”

In developing countries, “big data” analytics has been touted as having the power to unlock the door to more fair, convenient, equitable financial access to all citizens. While its promise is compelling, the evidence on the ground is thin, and recent debates in high income countries have highlighted very real fears that these data and technologies will exacerbate the financial and social inequities they were engineered to alleviate. This work attempts to fill the knowledge gap in India and serve as a starting point for a longer-term, action-oriented engagement with stakeholders in the sector. Amy Mowl is a development economist based in India specializing In financial inclusion. She has nearly a decade of experience conducting qualitative and quantitative research in the country, her most recent focus being on the institutional and structural barriers to financial inclusion.